Commitment to a life of prayer and community can prove to be a great help for those involved in politics. Rather than being distracted away from action, Evan B. Howard argues that committed Christians often find both freedom and empowerment to contribute to the greater good of the world. A review of the history of committed Christian life (monasticism) shows that devout communities have engaged in a wide range of socio-political arenas. We can explore today what nuns and monks have accomplished in the past. We can speak into political conversations. We can care for those in need. We can model new ways of ordering life together. We can take concrete political action in governmental process. We can pray. This book blends examination of history with musings about the Christian life and politics generally. It also offers a collection of monastic practices to equip communities and individuals to embody an appropriate blend of “deep” and “wide” for themselves.

This eccentric title recalls a collection of tales first told to grandchildren at bedtime. Each chapter begins with a fun-to-read farmer-boy story from the 1940s, an era before industrial farming when horses, cows, and chickens were still members of the family. These anecdotes each launch a theme that splashes down with further development in later decades of life. Diverse topics include imaginative play, construction crew humor, animal intelligence, contemplative prayer and journal writing, rural and urban farming, communal wisdom, and affordable housing, along with a few serious pranks and the prophetic mischief that follows. This memoir is also a confession in the pattern of Augustine, reflecting on God’s in-breaking initiatives and the writer’s emerging sense of calling in lifelong conversation with Jesus. Its stories offer a series of curiosity-driven on-ramps into eight decades of transformative experiences for curious souls to ponder an open-eyed faith and a communal way of life for the long haul.

Forty life histories of Southeast Asian elders are gathered in this volume. Collectively they reveal insider personal perspectives on new immigrant family adaptation to American life at the end of the 20th century.

Elder Wisdom invites us to a refreshing new vision of aging in the company of one hundred creative elders who share their insights and experiences about getting older. These mentors invite us to reflect on their lives so that we can reflect on our lives with pertinent questions about how we are eldering. They don't promise us an "ageless body" or a "timeless mind," but rather practical wisdom on how we can grow inwardly and reach out during later life in exciting and rewarding new ways. Over a two-year period, Eugene Bianchi interviewed more than one hundred older people for this book. Their ages range from the midsixties to centenarians. They range from well-known people such as Jimmy Carter, Maggie Kuhn, E. G. Marshall, Tillie Olsen, Desmond Tutu, Martin Marty, and June Singer to an electrician, a teacher, a homemaker, an entrepreneur, an artist, and a bookstore owner. The selection is at once diverse and universal. The book's gift is its power to draw us into lives that are similar to our own, so that we can apply its elder wisdom to ourselves. Topics covered include learning from work and life's turning points, empowering your elder self, expanding, reaching out, cherishing your family, cultivating friendships, encountering mortality, developing a personal spirituality, and sharing gifts of wisdom. Elder Wisdom is not just for the still-active elder. It is a pathfinder that will help all of us move toward elderhood in creative and promising ways.

Many young idealists, after a few failures, burn out and return to status quo lives. Not so with the seven radicals in this book, who met in an interracial house church and intentional community on Chicago’s West Side during the civil rights era. Here you will make the acquaintance of a Church of the Brethren pastoral couple who tried to bring communal life to the black ghetto; a fashionable socialite who trashed her curlers and joined the simple life; an elite Stanford graduate who cast his lot with a bus full of black teens on an epic ride to Washington, DC, to hear MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech; two ethnic-Mennonite women who became community leaders and elders during a male-dominated era; and a painfully shy “geek” awakened to the traumas of racism by five days in the Albany, Georgia, jail. Now, in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, these veterans of community witness to the possibility of radical life conversions, engagement with the hard, slow work of racial reconciliation that learns from mistakes and does not quit. This book concludes with the invitation to the joyful path of becoming who God made us to be—saints.

Edward the Elder, son and successor of King Alfred, was one of the greatest architects of the English state and yet is one of the most neglected kings of English history. During his 24-year reign, Edward led a series of successful campaigns against the Vikings and by the time of his death controlled most of southern and midland England, with his influence also felt in Wales and the north. Edward the Elder is a timely reassessment of his reign and helps to restore this ruler to his rightful place in English history. The period of Edward's reign is notably lacking in primary materials for historians. But by drawing upon sources as diverse as literature, archaeology, coins and textiles, this book brings together a rich variety of scholarship to offer new insight into the world of Edward the Elder. With this wealth of perspectives, Edward the Elder offers a broad picture of Edward's reign and his relation to the politics and culture of the Anglo-Saxon period.

On a winter night in 1743, a local magistrate was stabbed to death in the churchyard of Rye by an angry butcher. Why did this gruesome crime happen? What does it reveal about the political, economic, and cultural patterns that existed in this small English port town? To answer these questions, this fascinating book takes us back to the mid-sixteenth century, when religious and social tensions began to fragment the quiet town of Rye and led to witch hunts, riots, and violent political confrontations. Paul Monod examines events over the course of the next two centuries, tracing the town’s transition as it moved from narrowly focused Reformation norms to the more expansive ideas of the emerging commercial society. In the process, relations among the town’s inhabitants were fundamentally altered. The history of Rye mirrored that of the whole nation, and it gives us an intriguing new perspective on England in the early modern period.

New Russia begins in 1905-07. A revolution which failed was also a moment of truth. By proceeding in a way unexpected by supporters and adversaries alike it offered a dramatic corrective to their understanding of Russia. In what followed Russian history was to be dominated by the transforming efforts of monarchists who learnt that only 'revolution from above' could save their tsardom and by Marxists who, under the impact of revolution which failed, looked anew at Russia and their Marxism. On the opposing sides of the political scale, Stolypin and Lenin came to share a new image of Russia recognisable today as one of a 'developing society', and to act upon that. While Russia began a new century with a revolution, it is equally true that a new century in world history began with the Russian revolution of 1905-07. Since then a new type of society and of revolution have been evident throughout the world. Most of the theoretical tools to grasp those environments and changes were first set in Russia of the period described. The book begins with the forces and elements which came together in the 1905-07 revolution. It then presents and analyses the urban struggle, the still little known peasant war and the relations between those two confrontations. It proceeds to the conclusions drawn from the revolution by the different social classes, parties and leaders and the way this has shaped Russia's future and consequently of the world today, defining also economics and agrarian reforms, developmentism and communism, liberation struggles and anti-insurgencies.

A leading figure in the Theosophical Society, Leadbeater was a prolific author, writing on subjects ranging from Buddhism, Masonic history and the origins of Christianity through to the power of thought and the fourth dimension. Leadbeater was also the force behind Annie Besant, the discoverer and educator if Krishnamurti, and became Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church. For all his influence Charles Leadbeater remains largely unknown as a man. This biography, first published in 1982, dispels many of the mysteries surrounding his life, and Leadbeater emerges as neither evil degenerate or infallible saint, but as a complex and eccentric adventurer into the realm of the occult. This title will be of particular interest to students of history and theology.

Chiang Ching-kuo, son and political heir of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was born in 1910, when Chinese women, nearly all illiterate, hobbled about on bound feet and men wore pigtails as symbols of subservience to the Manchu Dynasty. In his youth Ching-kuo was a Communist and a Trotskyite, and he lived twelve years in Russia. He died in 1988 as the leader of Taiwan, a Chinese society with a flourishing consumer economy and a budding but already wild, woolly, and open democracy. He was an actor in many of the events of the last century that shaped the history of China's struggles and achievements in the modern era: the surge of nationalism among Chinese youth, the grand appeal of Marxism-Leninism, the terrible battle against fascist Japan, and the long, destructive civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1949, he fled to Taiwan with his father and two million Nationalists. He led the brutal suppression of dissent on the island and was a major player in the cold, sometimes hot war between Communist China and America. By reacting to changing economic, social, and political dynamics on Taiwan, Sino-American rapprochement, Deng Xiaoping's sweeping reforms on the mainland, and other international events, he led Taiwan on a zigzag but ultimately successful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Jay Taylor underscores the interaction of political developments on the mainland and in Taiwan and concludes that if China ever makes a similar transition, it will owe much to the Taiwan example and the Generalissimo's son.